The lead counsel for the anti-8 side -- the side which opposes the CA marriage amendment -- is Ted Olson. He wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek in which he outlined his constitutional argument in favor of SSM.
At the outset he attempted to cloak his view with the mantle of conservativsm. He failed abjectly. Yes, Olson is a lifelong Republican but that is not the equivalent of being a conservative. Yes, Olson served in the Reagan Administration, but that does not make his argument conservative. He has played capture the flag with the conservative label. To be fair, lots of prominent politicians play that game.
There is a conservative-leaning argument in favor of the state-sanctioned one-sexed union, however, Olson did not use it but explicitly disparaged domestic partnership, civil union, and provisions for designated beneficiaries.
Olson's view has a decidely libertarian bent. In his article, Olson imagines that the US Constituton was written by modern day libertarians; his view of the 14th Amendment exemplifies this bit of imaginative rewriting of our framework of government. (That rewriting must have been done with invisible ink.) He also ignored the libertarian argument which stands against the merger of SSM with marriage. He doesn't even touch the liberal argument against the merger. So his use of the conservative label is purely for rhetorical effect, as far as I can tell. It allows him cover to presuppose that SSM is a subset of marriage which is excluded by the CA marriage amendment.
Rather than write one long detailed blogpost in reply to Olson's Newsweek article, I am going to make a series of short blogposts on the bits and pieces that makeup Olson's stated view of the marriage issue.
I think that Olson shows that SSM argumentation has quickly fossilized and remains stuck on playing gay identity politics as a trump card. It is that gambit which gives his view its coherency; without it, his view is fragmented and offers an irrational basis for the SSM-merger.
More to come.
Return to "Answering Ted Olson: Updates."
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Please note for future reference that the term, SSM, is commonly understood, for the sake of convenience, to mean "same-sex marriage". When used by marriage defenders, this term typically does not mean that SSM is a type of authentic marriage. When I use the term, SSM, it means the "Specious Substitution of Marriage". This coincides with the meaning of the proposed merger of marriage and the subset of nonmarriage that SSMers emphasize and favor. Now, some may disagree with my use of the term, SSM, however, to understand my series of blogposts on Olson's Newsweek piece, this shorthand is indispensable.
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